SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[goishen]

Well, no.   I've been playing ME since the release of Sim City.   A lot more disconnects, Origin isn't running so, therefore, we're gonna close ME now (just to see my Origin screen right after ME closes), and you not getting credits whenever you deserve them.   Get your damn Sim City nonsense outta my ME.

[Khaldun]

So much as I like the autonomous agents concept, it is the last fucking thing in the world I would try on any sort of conventional multiplayer/server setup. It absolutely demands to be done entirely client-side--it has enough complexities and messiness all by itself before you try to network it extensively. I am now thinking that this is two levels of totally separate cock-up: EA's stupidity about always-on DRM *and* a crazy level of hubris about modeling and simulation from a dev team that understood what some of the cool conceptual shit around people doing artificial societies modeling was but who tried to implement it in a scale and design that is about a million steps beyond anything anyone's tried.

[rk47]

LOL@ ME fail caused by SC.
Talk about domino effect.
But u haf no pruf. >:( EA foreva.

It's a nice lemmings simulator

[Paelos]

It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Like herpes!

[Jeff Kelly]

Wait, does this mean that me having to wait more than two minutes until origin decides it lets me run Mass Effect has something to do with the Sim City server issues?

I was wondering why the "checking for installed add-ons" and "connecting to origin" steps took so awfully long.

[rk47]

Wait, does this mean that me having to wait more than two minutes until origin decides it lets me run Mass Effect has something to do with the Sim City server issues?

I was wondering why the "checking for installed add-ons" and "connecting to origin" steps took so awfully long.

Jeff Kelly,

It's nice to see EA customers having fun and wanting to log-in so often into one of our fantastic games they own.
But they have to understand that these issues are not connected at all, and the only thing that is common for both games are that they are both very popular amongst the fans. Hence an extra load is expected on our log-in servers whenever such mega-hit games receive the attention of die hard fans. Mass Effect 3 MP DLC: Reckoning, the last FREE release content may have caused that extra delay in your log-in services.

Stay strong, Jeff Kelly and keep up the good fight.
Admiral Hackett

[jakonovski]

Population levels are also padded, seems like in a big city only about 10% of the population are actual sims. And that is already enough to clog up everything!

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/

So this is the second thing that has been puzzling the hell out of me today. Did EA lie about how much population a city could support in this game in order to reassure the potential player-base that small tile sizes would be okay?
Check out this thread from the Sim City forums. In particular this post:

A Low Income - Low Density House has 6 adults, 4 are workers and 2 are shoppers. If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 6. Makes sense.
A Low Income - Med Density House has 60 adults, 40 are workers, 20 are shoppers If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 60. Makes sense.
A Low Income - High Density House is where things go all whacky... By the pattern above you would assume that a high density home would be 600 adults where 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers, and this is true. If you look at the data layers (at the right times) you will see that there are indeed 600 residents and 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers....
BUT...
If you destroy this High Density house, your population goes down by 5200!!!!! (As well as increasing by 5200 when it gets rebuilt)
So either the worker/shopper count is bugged for high population buildings, OR they are purposefully "padding" the bottom center population numbers to make the city look bigger than it actually is.

So what the hell? This basically confirms a lot of suspicions of mine and others that we aren't actually seeing that many sims in our cities and it also explains why only 1/10 of the population is working. We don't actually have as many people in our cities as we think! EA has stated numerous times that their internal testers were able to get cities of 500k and even 1 million sims, but in reality they may have been blowing smoke up our asses! What the fuck, if I'm having traffic problems at ~100k sims (which is actually more on the order of 10k sims) imagine what would happen if I had 10 times more sims on the streets.
Am I deluding myself or is it a real possibility that this gamebreaking design decision cannot be remedied?

[rk47]

Nonsense. EA never lies. Why the false accusations bro? 

[Mrbloodworth]

This whole "Agents take the shortest route" stuff feels like something was hobbled as an "Optimization" due to the server based nature, if the game truly is closer to a dumb terminal like they claim. An actor not needing to make a division check on road type in pathing would be a significant reduction, same with the "goes to first open house".

[Lantyssa]

Except they're ending up in a queue, and likely recalculating over and over.  They'd be better off with a random chance of destination, which closer slots having a slightly higher occurrence.  Don't let the sim recalculate its destination, only its path after X amount of time.

[Mrbloodworth]

I went from A to B. You are saying C may be better. I say, no shit. That was not my point :) I think they had a much more full simulation planed, but trimmed it down and now it shows the behavior people are seeing. Shortest line, ETC.. Any "actor" in a building is no longer an "actor", its a variable of a building, no decision points, not pathing, no automation. So shortest and least amount of decision points the better. I also recall in earlier videos the simulation being much larger in much larger cities.

[MisterNoisy]

This whole "Agents take the shortest route" stuff feels like something was hobbled as an "Optimization" due to the server based nature, if the game truly is closer to a dumb terminal like they claim. An actor not needing to make a division check on road type in pathing would be a significant reduction, same with the "goes to first open house".

All the calculations for traffic and the like are done client side, though - any trimming back is most likely so that they could put '2GB RAM' and 'GeForce 7800' (a seven-year old video card) on the back of the box as the minimum system requirements so that Grandma can run it on her PoS $399 Dell.

[Mrbloodworth]

You sure that's not just prediction/Reaction to already sent updates? And I meant Decision, not division  in that quote. oops.


As for the whole, "I don't really have 2 million sims walking around". That's a no brainier. Actors in the buildings are fine, you do not really need 2m sims. A fraction of that would still feel right. Things like 4 of them are in a car, 20 on a buss, 3k in a building, ETC.. The odd part to me is it seems to only happen with that one house/building type, sounds like a bug.

Still, I think there was a much grander plan originally, but the origin/DRM intentions got in the way, clearly.

[koro]

The server, by EA's own admission, only sends/receives updates from your client every three minutes or so.

It's possible to keep playing your active city just fine from anywhere between twenty minutes to nearly an hour with no internet connection, and thus no updates to or from the server, so all the pathing is done on your end.

[Numtini]

Sounds to me like there was an executive requirement to implement some kind of autonomous sim movement, but not to make the sim movement do anything that would, well, actually make it worthwhile. The whole point of having them travel would be to link them to a specific house and them have them determine if they want to keep living there or move closer to work or further away to avoid crime. All those things that go into living and commuting in an urban/suburban life. Instead it's just silliness that clogs the servers.

[tmp]

This whole "Agents take the shortest route" stuff feels like something was hobbled as an "Optimization" due to the server based nature, if the game truly is closer to a dumb terminal like they claim. An actor not needing to make a division check on road type in pathing would be a significant reduction, same with the "goes to first open house".

Except going by the link from the previous page what they claim is far from the truth. And the tests done with running the game for quite a while without issues while lacking the intrawebs connection seem to confirm that.

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

[Sparky]

Should've just stuck with a statistical simulation and given us huge cities.  Instead we get a crude agent sim that lacks any agent persistence and dumb looking tiny cities.  Glassbox is a bust.

[calapine]

Here is a video that shows the problem. All Sims leaving work drive to a single, isolated house  - simply because it's the nearest. Of course only the first Sims actually get in, which doesn't stop the entire enchilada already enroute to drive there and try it anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDeSRdHvefw


Second video, same issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WH-CdkSqDSs

[Mrbloodworth]

Sounds to me like there was an executive requirement to implement some kind of autonomous sim movement, but not to make the sim movement do anything that would, well, actually make it worthwhile. The whole point of having them travel would be to link them to a specific house and them have them determine if they want to keep living there or move closer to work or further away to avoid crime. All those things that go into living and commuting in an urban/suburban life. Instead it's just silliness that clogs the servers.

Perhaps that's the key to this entire thing here. Visual representation is not what matters and why city's can go on unconnected. Because the simulation part is still just numbers ALA 3. Mabye the servers just sanity check ( And disperse updates ) the last 3 minutes. That does however suggest the games not as dumb terminal as they have claimed.

[Mrbloodworth]

Here is a video that shows the problem. All Sims leaving work drive to a single, isolated house  - simply because it's the nearest. Of course only the first Sims actually get in, which doesn't stop the entire enchilada already enroute to drive there and try it anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDeSRdHvefw


Second video, same issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WH-CdkSqDSs

Yeah, Glad I went with Tropico 4. That looks like no fun at all. Sim city, where city planing means fuckall!

[Outlawedprod]

http://mashable.com/2012/08/13/simcity-detailed-simulations/

"Before, SimCity used to be like paint programs with sprites, but now we are taking all the things that make a city tick and embedding them inside the buildings and on the roads," says Quigley.

"The things I want people to understand at the meta level aren't things like 'crime is bad' or 'you should educate people.' It's more that I want people to understand that there are so many moving parts and mechanics to making a city work, like water, power, sewage, police," he says. "I'm not so much after narrow political messages, but more to make people understand the mechanics of cities."

Fast forward 6 months.  I believe the message has come through loud and clear on simulating a city:  Fuck. This shit be hard yo!

[Sky]

I was kind of interested in this title a while ago.

These videos showing just how phoned in the AI and mechanics are so horrible I don't see how you could fix that.

[Outlawedprod]

It's a different kind of game. Just need to learn how to play it all over.

For example Sims don't really need commercial or industrial for happiness. Just make parks and lower taxes.  Ezmode city design ftw.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a7iqq/apparently_commercial_and_industrial_zones_are/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdu1ho2Ic4

Or you can just optimize roads like the pros if you want a big city.

Bonus example of hilarious police state fail.

Did some code really get leaked?!
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/c8uqv8v

UI code was leaked a couple days ago. In it you will find a funny little function called GetFudgedPopulation. You can find the raw code here.

Here's the important part:

if (500 >= a)
    return a;

if (40845 < a)
    return Math.floor(8.25 * a);

a = Math.pow(a - 500, 1.2) + 500;
return Math.floor(a);

So yup, figures at or under 500 are correct, then a different formula for >= 40845 pop, and lastly for anything in-between you get the final formula.

[Fabricated]

[Mrbloodworth]

Ouch.

[Margalis]

To me the AI problems smack of making a decision, getting really invested in it, and refusing to reconsider it once it proves to be unworkable.

The idea of everyone in the game actually being simulated is really cool. It would also be incredibly CPU expensive to do, so naturally you need some shortcuts. Unfortunately they needed so many shortcuts that it makes the game bad and also fails to accomplish the original high-level goal of simulating people - the simulation is so bad it can't even be called a "simulation."

Making the game systems work based on simulation of actual actors is a pretty fucking crazy idea to be honest - it hinges entirely on the behavior of the individuals coalescing into a recognizable system. People know how cities operate - writing agent AI that as a whole ends up working like a city is close to impossible. If your pathfinding is somewhat off now you have fires right next to the fire station, police cars randomly circling the same block while crime runs rampant, etc, and since you have no systems model other than individual behavior there's no easy fix.

The game is fundamentally not a city simulation - it's an shitty AI actor simulation in a city locale. A city simulation necessarily has to be more abstract.

I think this thing would work if the actors were the focus - if the game was "Sim Alien Ant Farm" where the agents were creatures of some sort and how they interacted was the interesting part of the game, without any expectations for how their society should function. (With a smaller number of actors so they could run reasonable AI)

To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail and to the Sims team every Sim games looks like The Sims I guess. The more I think about it the more I'm convinced the approach is simply fundamentally unworkable as a city sim.

[Maledict]

On the plus side, I had no interest in buying Sim city in the first place but saw someone mention Tropico, realised it was on sale for a ridiculously cheap price and now have been playing obsessively to the point of even ignoring Starcraft 2...

[Sky]

Even beyond all those terribad issues, the small square cities just look sucky. At this point we should have huge swaths of land with all kinds of cool features to build around.

[Mithas]

Even beyond all those terribad issues, the small square cities just look sucky. At this point we should have huge swaths of land with all kinds of cool features to build around.

This. The small city size is the reason I didn't buy it. I decided to hold off and see how things would shake out. EA already would have my money. Now I don't see any reason for me to buy it at all even if they straighten out all the server issues.

[Yegolev]

I'm choking on so much delicious popcorn.

[Sjofn]

To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail and to the Sims team every Sim games looks like The Sims I guess. The more I think about it the more I'm convinced the approach is simply fundamentally unworkable as a city sim.

There are already games like Tropico and CotN where there are little people doing their little people things. You can follow a dude in Tropico 4's life, watch him grow up, decide to go to high school, graduate, get a high-school-requiring-job, look at his family (who all have histories and skills of their own), etc. Fuck, you could do that in Tropico 1! Given the tiny space you're given to build your city in SimCity V, they could've managed it, I am pretty sure. I am sure that's the bigger reason people are pissed it doesn't work anything like that. If you're going to cut down on city size so you can have little people wandering around without destroying someone's computer, you need it to work like the other city builders that have smaller cities and little dudes.

[WayAbvPar]

I'm choking on so much delicious popcorn.

Haha totally. I hope they never fix it and everyone keeps screaming about it. Mostly because fuck EA.

[bhodi]

Same.

[Margalis]

There are already games like Tropico and CotN where there are little people doing their little people things. You can follow a dude in Tropico 4's life, watch him grow up, decide to go to high school, graduate, get a high-school-requiring-job, look at his family (who all have histories and skills of their own), etc.

I assume that the Tropico guy is driven by the simulation rather than driving it. Or put another way, his actions are an expression of the underlying simulation rather than the definition.

If you have a working simulation based on systemic models you can populate your world with actors that jive with the results of the simulation. The problem with Sim City is that there are no underlying systems separate from the actions of the individual actors.

[Sir T]

There was an old came called Startopia (available on GOG.com!) where you could follow your workers around and watch them do all their little things if you wanted. It was great. But you had less than a hundred of them. Following your guys around isn't that innovative an idea. But in a simcity game you don't want that level of detail, simply because keeping track of it all would tax a supercomputer, and would limit the size of the cities you could run in any case. You are basically using massive amounts of grunt on a rarely used gimmick.